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Front Page » Transportation » Reversible lanes might ease traffic jams

Reversible lanes might ease traffic jams

Written by on November 25, 2015
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Reversible lanes might ease traffic jams

County commissioners are scheduled to decide whether to direct the administration to collaborate with the Miami-Dade County Metropolitan Planning Organization to prepare a feasibility study on reversible lanes.

The legislation, which appears on the Dec. 1 commission agenda, highlights the need to create efficiencies in traffic flow on thoroughfares and states that the use of reversible lanes might help do so during times of the day when traffic is heavier in one direction.

Rebeca Sosa, who is sponsoring the resolution, spoke during an August meeting about a plan to reverse lanes of traffic during rush hour.

She said “now that Mayor Carlos Gimenez allocated funding to synchronize the traffic lights, we could do this with arrows and the lanes could be computer-controlled.”

This is already being done near Sun Life Stadium to route traffic before and after games, she said, and has been done successfully for years in Puerto Rico, where Ms. Sosa said traffic is worse than Miami.

Under the reversible lane plan, east-west roads like Flagler Street and Bird Road would have more eastbound lanes open in the morning to handle the commuter flow from the western suburbs into downtown. In the evenings, more lanes heading west would serve those same commuters on their ride home.

Ms. Sosa said the county will ask the state transportation department to study north-south routes such as LeJeune Road and Miami Avenue to determine the demand for reversible lanes.

“If you learn a behavior pattern, then you work with that,” Ms. Sosa said in August. “Computers can respond to the need” as traffic patterns emerge.

On Sept. 29, the Metropolitan Planning Organization approved a resolution for a scope of work and budget to determine the feasibility and best way to implement reversible lanes along major thoroughfares in the county.

On Nov. 12, the Transit & Mobility Services committee unanimously approved the resolution and sent a favorable recommendation to the full commission.

5 Responses to Reversible lanes might ease traffic jams

  1. thomas lindhart

    November 29, 2015 at 10:57 am

    Yes lets punish the people who have traffic efficient commutes by closing lanes against traffic. To promote equality all should suffer.

  2. victor

    November 29, 2015 at 9:37 pm

    LOL…So you want to take streets that have high volume of traffic and make them one line in the morning and one lane in the afternoon. So which streets should the opposing traffic take? Oh by the way, when you do that, that means you are flooding the other streets, so now you increase traffic on the other streets, which many of them are going to be neighborhood streets. Smart move

  3. Ben Grimm

    December 1, 2015 at 9:37 am

    The commission and MDX told the public that having more toll roads was going to fix our east-west traffic woes. Other commissioners are working at a Tri-Rail route to get more westenders on transit. Is this Mrs. Sosa’s attempt to steal the limelight (and funding) from her fellow commissioners while making the neighborhoods along Flagler Street suffer for no good reason?

  4. Ben Grimm

    December 1, 2015 at 9:48 am

    The photo for this article is of US-1, not Flagler St, Bird Rd, LeJeune Rd or Miami Avenue. The article doesn’t seem to be about US-1 at all.

  5. Adam Old

    December 1, 2015 at 8:05 pm

    Miami has tried to widen its way out of traffic congestion since the 80s. It has not worked. It will not work. Reversible lanes are one step beyond simply road widening—in that the are more efficient use of space than a regular widening, adding lanes without width—but it will be expensive, and have the same ultimate effect, encouraging more people to build and move to auto dependent suburbs and commute alone, eventually clogging the reversed lanes.

    More lanes will not work. Most of Sosa’s colleagues are starting to realize this, but she still seems to think that just one more lane will fix the problem.

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